Recollect Season 3 Episode 3 – with Gerty Mitchell, Transformation Silence into Freedom

Recollect: Black Women Decolonizing thru Story & Nature

Recollect Season 3 Episode 3 – with Gerty Mitchell, Transformation Silence into Freedom. So nice to be back! Happy 2023! In this episode of the Recollect Podcast, I am joined by Gerty Mitchell. She’s Haitian-American, and living life with a purpose in the vibrant city of Durham, North Carolina. She is a woman who is unapologetic and intentional about discovering and living her truth as a human being. We are at Her Story Garden Studios in Durham masked up and having one of our decolonizing conversations just after reading Audrey Lorde’s Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. In our conversation, we talk about the power of not being silent as a parent when you become aware that you have done wrong and how much that is a form of decolonization for the generations to come. After we finally get that container of hummus open and get our tea, we settle in on the sofas and talk about the importance of speaking up at work, at church, in our neighborhoods, and in other places where we need to teach ourselves the difference between speaking and thinking you might get killed, and speaking because if you don’t you might get killed. We wrap all that silence up as a need to decolonize our minds and get free. We end with a reading from my memoir in-progress Recollect, and are shocked that the word “freedom” only shows up once, but that’s because I haven’t let the document load. LOL! Another funny, sidebar, at the end of this podcast, I am reading an excerpt from the forthcoming memoir, Recollect, and at the beginning of the reading, I speak of myself as being 57 years old, which I am, but at the end of the reading, I say I am 47. That is likely a transformation that happened through the activity of skydiving in that excerpt. Enjoy, and remember, Recollect is listener supported so subscribe and drop some coins in the jukebox. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/zelda-lockhart/support